Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Life of Reason

Beauty is objectified pleasure.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty

In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Life of Reason

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Dialogues in Limbo

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Platonism and the Spiritual Life

The God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Life of Reason

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks

Fill us with deeper longing for her word;

She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,

She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, "Premonition," A Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems

To be happy, even to conceive happiness, you must be reasonable or ... you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passions and learned your place in the world.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Egotism in German Philosophy

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Life of Reason

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Atoms of Thought

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, "Dickens," Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

GEROGE SANTAYANA, Atoms of Thought

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Life of Reason

Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow

And be not happy like a naked star,

Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow,

Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, "Premonition," A Hermit of Carmel

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Atoms of Thought

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Life of Reason

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Genteel Tradition at Bay

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

GEORGE SANTAYANA, Character and Opinion in the United States

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.